High gas prices heighten interest in telework

Work-from-home programs could save companies millions in real estate and other costs

With the costs of travelling to and from work soaring due to climbing fuel prices, employers may find themselves contemplating ways to help ease commuting woes.

At Toronto’s York University, long-time carpooler Kimberley Glaze said she has noticed colleagues showing a higher level of interest in the carpool matching service that she uses.

“In the past few weeks, people have been coming to me asking, ‘Do you know if they’ve got a ride in my area,’” said Glaze, manager of employee development and communications.

An Angus, Ont., resident who travels more than 90 kilometres each way, Glaze said her carpooling saves her about $3,720 annually in gas and car insurance premiums.

As more and more offices move into suburbs, workers are making longer trips and becoming more reliant on cars to get to work. According to Statistics Canada, the number of jobs located in the suburbs rose by 63 per cent between 1981 and 2001 and more than doubled in cities such as Sherbrooke, Que., Toronto, Windsor, Ont., Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary and Vancouver. With 74 per cent of Canadians driving their cars to work as of the last census in 2001, the pain at the pump is going to be widely felt.

The service that Glaze uses, Toronto-based Smart Commute, is part of a Canada-wide network of 9,400 carpoolers registered through the website, www.carpool.ca. Anne-Marie Thornton, executive director of Commuter Connections, the Vancouver-based non-profit that launched the website in 2000, said the number of people signed up for carpools has doubled since this time last year.

Participation in carpools is still hampered by a widespread misconception about the level of commitment required, said Thornton, adding that being part of a ride-share program does not prevent anyone from opting out a few days a week to run errands. Employers can help people overcome similar inconveniences by having ride guarantees. At York University, Glaze can count on having access to a rental car if the driver she’s getting a ride from fails to make it to work.

Work-from-home options

People who aren’t interested in sharing rides are nevertheless looking at ways to cut down the number of trips they make, said Smart Commute North Toronto, Vaughan executive director Brian Schifman. That may mean more people are coming to employers with requests to work from home — even for a few days a week, said Bob Fortier, president of the Canadian Telework Association.

He said he has come across people who are saying, “Hey, I’ve always wanted to telework, and here’s an extra heavy straw on my back that’s really making me want to do it, because if the gas prices keep on rising, the cost of commuting will go through the roof.”

Most work-from-home arrangements today take place on an informal basis as a result of agreements between individual managers and their reports, said Fortier.

“It starts slow with someone saying, ‘Hey next Tuesday I’ve got the Maytag repairman coming over. Do you mind if I do this report from my house?’ Then gradually it becomes every Tuesday.”

Informal telework programs have certain disadvantages, said Fortier. They may lead to jealousy among other team members. Or they take place without the support of HR, which means that a manager who needs support or guidance with managerial issues may not get it.

In contrast, if telework is offered as a formal program, “the employer would know how much telework is going on. It would know what some of the successes are and failures and weak points are. And when appraisal time comes around, the manager’s manager takes telework into account.”

There’s still a considerable amount of resistance by managers to letting people work from home, said Fortier. “The barriers are not necessarily the fact that many jobs are not ‘teleworkable.’ I would say the barriers are resistance and perception. You’d be surprised at how many people work in eminently ‘teleworkable’ jobs, whose managers just won’t let them telework. They feel they’re more in control when they can see the employees.”

Organizations that are familiar with telework arrangements can help organizations weather upheavals such as power outages or transit strikes. If someone is injured, for example, a work-from-home arrangement may help keep that person productive.

Done systematically, telework can save an average Canadian business $5 million to $8 million a year, said Fortier. A good chunk of that — an estimated $1.5 million — comes from reduced real estates costs.

‘Flex office’

One employer enthusiastically embracing telework and flexible office arrangements is Sun Microsystems. With 16,000 employees worldwide, or about half of the workforce, participating in what it calls the iWork program, Sun Microsystems saved “several millions of dollars” in real estate costs in 2004-2005, said Garry Hagerman, regional workplace manager for Sun Microsystems Canada.

The initiative came from the desire to “live Sun’s vision of everybody being able to work anywhere anytime,” said Hagerman.

This means that for every 160 employees, the company only has to provide 100 work stations. Everybody’s on flex status unless they’ve got special needs that would require them to be at a dedicated desk at all times — that is, if they work with special equipment or if they’ve got a physical impairment.

If people come to work in the office, they arrive at cubicles or offices that they’ve reserved — but not more than five consecutive times. They dial in a command so that calls to their extension are directed to the phone set at hand. And instead of desktop or laptop computers, they work with Sun Ray thin clients, which are in effect “dumb” terminals connected to a powerful server in the backroom that does all the computing and data storing. An employee accesses his work on the computer by inserting into the terminal a smart card the size of a credit card.

“Aside from the real estate savings, one of the big benefits is the flexibility of your portfolio — being able to quickly deal with head-count growth or head-count reduction. It’s much easier than if you hire 25 new employees and you have to go lease more space and fill it with more seats,” said Hagerman.

“Another great example was on 9/11 when we lost two floors in the World Trade Center. There were 300-odd people in that office, and it was a flex office at the time. And literally within 36 hours, those employees who had lost that office were able to work from homes or at other offices in the New York area. All of their data were transferred out of that office and were set up on servers around New York City.”

Helping managers and employees making the cultural shift are about half a dozen HR professionals working out of the company’s information systems group. Their role is to survey people on their attitudes about this new work arrangement and to provide training and guidelines to both managers and employees.

Valerie Petroff, HR country manager for Sun Microsystems Canada, said employees have responded positively to the added flexibility. In a recent employee survey, the company saw “a 19-per-cent increase in satisfaction where it says, ‘The iWork program at Sun provides the flexibility and support I need to accomplish my objectives,’” said Petroff.

“What this does for us is enhance our ability to attract and retain,” said Petroff. “This is something that employees have been talking about or asking about. And we have so many virtual teams and global teams. This way, they don’t have to go into the office and take a call at 1 o’clock in the morning. They can do it from home and login and check their e-mail at whatever time. And for a lot of people, it’s a lot less commute time, less time in traffic which ideally leads to less stress.”

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